Article carriers are often used in fruit graders to transport fruit through various measurement stages for grading purposes and to eject fruit at a required location dependent on the result of the grading process. Such article carriers usually include an endless circuit of carriers or cups on a conveyor chain with the cups situated to unload fruit at one of a plurality of stations.
Many of the article carriers of the prior art use rollers to rotate the fruit as they travel along on the conveyor, in order to present the entire surface of the fruit to a grading apparatus such as a camera. The article carriers may also be provided with a mechanism by which a portion of the carrier on which the fruit bears can be isolated from the rest of the carrier, and the supporting portion of the conveyor, in order to allow the fruit to be weighed while it is being conveyed. U.S. Pat. No. 7,410,044 describes an example of one such article carrier.
Such carriers, while well suited to use with generally spherically shaped fruit and vegetables such as apples and the like, are not suitable for use with elongate fruit or vegetables such as cucumbers, mangoes, pears, avocados and the like.
Another type of article carrier is known to the art, in which the article is held to one side of the conveyor chain on elongate “fingers”. While such carriers are suitable for elongate fruit or vegetables, they typically do not allow the produce to be weighed accurately.
In the examples discussed above, the article carrier remains connected to, and in motion with, the conveyor chain, while the article is being weighed. The horizontal component of the force exerted by the conveyor chain on the article carrier has no effect on the weighing operation. However, for the weighing operation to be accurate it is important that the connection between the conveyor chain and the carrier portion which is bearing on the load cell exert the minimum possible force on the carrier portion in the vertical direction.
The reference to any prior art in the specification is not, and should not be taken as, an acknowledgement or any form of suggestion that the prior art forms part of the common general knowledge in any country.